45/54 hour work weeks

I have seen both my parents work 40+ hour work weeks all their lives, mom worked 44 hour work weeks and dad worked 48 hour work weeks, but everything changed after the pandemic, mom being a teacher started teaching from home as schools were shut and dad’s company decided to move to a 4 day work week, 12 hour days, effectively reducing 2 overall work time in mom’s case and reducing 2 days of traveling time for dad.

And believe me, I haven’t seen them happier than this in their entire lives, somehow this restructuring of their work brought back happiness in their lives.

For mom, it was the overall reduction in the time, for dad it was less travel, less context switching, and fewer odd shift timings that the 8-hour shift brought in.

When I write this, both of these changes have been undone, mom is back in school, still teaching online tho, and dad is back with abrupt shift timings, and their happiness has significantly gone down.

Who knew how your work is structured had such a huge impact on life and happiness in general.

It’s just a bit more than a year that I started working formally and I have worked weird hours, sometimes 10 hour days, sometimes 9 hour days, and at times without a single off in the entire week, I have suffered from extreme stress and hair loss partially because of this and have been adding on weight.

Today I work 9-hour workdays with either 45 or 54 hour work weeks which mostly gets extended because I work half an hour extra every day on average, it takes another hour or hour and a half to consciously stop thinking about the problem I am solving, seems like our brains aren’t wired to voluntarily stop thinking, which makes the 9-hour workday almost stretched to 10 or 10 and a half-hour workday.

While manufacturing and labor-intensive or corporate workers work 8-hour workdays with 5 days a week, Knowledge workers especially in growing economy work 9-hour workdays 6 days a week, which of course isn’t productive to start with because the brain gets fatigued, the more intense and complex problems you work on, the more fatigued you will be.

Add to that the layer of General Management, a task-based system so tightly knit that it barely leaves breathing room for the worker to set back and take it slowly.

As the complexity of knowledge work grows, innovation in management seems to be extremely lagging.

And this is not an issue with a singular organization, this is widespread, it is an industry-wide issue.

In a work environment where man-hours ≠ brain-hours, measuring productivity by hours seems absolutely lame, packing 100% of the week with tasks, week over a week seems lame and is a definite failure of general management.

And as the size of families and close social circles decline (not assuming, these are facts), living independently means taking care of many responsibilities that were shared by multiple people in the past.

For someone like me, who is ambitious, has hobbies, and enjoys being social, this sort of work arrangement really doesn’t work, especially as I plan to move out and try living on my own. There’s just not any time left for it.

And the one extra Saturday off that I get, which I am really grateful for to this new company, goes away just in destressing and sleeping, and there’s always a huge checklist of things I need to buy, get repaired, or do because I know I won’t get any time for the next 15 days.

Single Sunday offs are a misery, you are too tired to do anything and everything is either closed or too crowded, add to that the terrifying feeling of ‘tomorrow is again a Monday and it exactly feels like a rat race, a rat race on a treadmill.

My parents have really stepped up in helping me out with smaller things, they clear out smaller stuff for me so that I have one less thing to worry about, but they aren’t always going to be around.

While making money is extremely important to me, because I don’t have any of it, this necessarily doesn’t seem like a great sustainable way of doing it.

I think everyone in it wants to change it, but this isn’t a one-person change, this has to be a movement.

I just hope that I look back on this 10 years from now and smile back at how things have changed for the better.